Last night in Final Fantasy XI, I had an excellent experience that reminded me of one of the particularly fun things about games with persistent online worlds: the scope for accidental, unstructured yet nonetheless meaningful instances of playing with other people.
I was working my way through the Grand Palace of Hu'Xzoi, one of the last dungeons in the Chains of Promathia expansion. This dungeon initially looks like something of a labyrinth, but there's actually a linear path through it; a lot of exits are blocked off, forcing you to go one particular direction, and certain doors can only be triggered by activating a "Quasilumin" entity at a special alcove, which will then proceed on patrol — while you have to protect them, naturally — and open various portals along the way.
This task is soloable, particularly with the computer-controlled "Trust" characters you can bring nearly everywhere with you in the game at this point, but it can be a slow process, what with you having to stop and start the Quasilumin in order to keep them out of trouble, clear a path through the enemies ahead and follow along to make sure they don't leave you behind. There's also a time limit on each patrol, so you can't hang around too long.
Partway through my explorations, I ran into another player who was seemingly doing the same thing as me. We didn't really say a lot to one another, but it was pretty clear we were working on the same objective. Since Final Fantasy XI's dungeons are not instanced — that means you can just randomly run into other players doing the same thing as you, rather than getting your own "private" version of a dungeon to clear at your leisure — it tends to pay off if you team up with people you randomly run into.
And sure enough, it did. We settled into a good rhythm where my companion would keep an eye on the Quasilumin, starting and stopping it as required, while I would go on ahead and clear out the enemies in the path it was about to take. Together, it still took a while, but we eventually successfully made it through the whole dungeon, and it was a really nice, warm moment that we shared together.
I'm generally not a big fan of playing with random other people, whether the game in question is competitive or cooperative. In competitive games, I don't like dealing with sweaties who take things far too seriously, and in cooperative games… well, I also don't like dealing with sweaties who take things far too seriously. You would think cooperative games would be a place where "nice" people hang out, but in my experience, no, that is absolutely not the case. In fact, some cooperative games feel way more toxic than anything competitive I have ever played.
All of the above is the case if you are playing structured activities, whether they are cooperative or competitive. When people jump into something like this, of course they want to win, and if they feel like someone is holding them back in some way — whether or not that is a fair assessment — they will, if they're a Certain Type of Person, kick off.
But if you're in an activity where the two (or more) of you have run into one another by complete chance, I tend to find that it's much more likely you will have a pleasant shared experience with one another. Last night's example in Final Fantasy XI is just the most recent example, but I also still have very fond memories of a time I was playing Test Drive Unlimited on Xbox 360, back when its servers were still active, and encountered someone on the high-speed freeway that runs across a lot of the map. This person was obviously just hooning it up and down the freeway in their Ferrari looking for trouble, and so I provided some trouble for them. We didn't even get into the game's organised one-on-one races by flashing our lights at one another; we just careened across most of the map, causing chaos along the way and having a thoroughly lovely time in the process.
Other people can be all right, sometimes. If you catch them when they're very much "at play" rather than taking their entertainment extremely super-seriously, it can even be super-fun to hang out with them and just dick around — no worrying about stats, progress or efficiency. Just pure, unbridled fun and joy; something we're all too short of these days, and thus I encourage you to cling onto it whenever you encounter it.
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I'm definitely coming up on the end of the Chains of Promathia expansion for Final Fantasy XI. Know how I can tell? Because I'm into an area where everything is made out of hexagons and light, and the world doesn't quite behave as it "should".
I'm not entirely sure why this became such a common trope in role-playing games, particularly those of Asian origin. I assume there's some sort of inherent significance to hexagons — or perhaps someone once just thought they looked cool and futuristic, and everyone else copied that first person. Both explanations are entirely plausible.
A lot of people mock role-playing games that pull the "final boss is in space!" trope, but I love it. One of my favourite things in video games is getting the opportunity to explore and play in abstract environments. There's a definite appeal to realistic environments under the right circumstances, but for me, there's always something special about making that switch from "recognisable" to "completely alien". Doesn't matter what game it is; if you go from hanging out in "the real world" to running along platforms suspended in a starfield — or, indeed, as I have been doing in Chains of Promathia this evening, running across a seemingly solid "sea" that floats above the land far below me, leaving a trail of hexagons and the sound of musical notes with every step I take.
I think the reason I like it is the fact it drives home how video games give you the opportunity to "do" things that are outright impossible in real life. There is not actually anywhere that exists that consists of floating platforms in space or transparent hexagons suspended over a petrified natural environment, and thus having the opportunity to spend time in those places as a virtual world is appealing. It's fascinating. In some respects, it provides a window into the creators' imagination, allowing us a sense that we are sharing in something quite special.
Of course, there's an argument to be made that when you explore a realistic but nonetheless fictional world in a game, you're also stepping into the creators' imagination, but it never feels quite as exciting as getting the opportunity to go somewhere completely alien. It's a silly trope, probably one that is overused at this point — and definitely one that has been used inappropriately (Half-Life's finale says hello) — but it's one that I will always like and appreciate.
I am tempted to see if I can finish off Chains of Promathia this evening, but it is already midnight, so I feel like I should probably go to bed like a responsible adult. Probably.
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One of the most common refrains of people who discuss the topic of enshittification is that so much stuff related to tech just flat-out doesn't work any more, and no-one seems in any great hurry to fix it — particularly when all the actually knowledgeable engineers have been replaced with "vibe-coding" cunts.
Here is a list of tech-related things that, through no fault of my own, have occurred in the last week:
My Windows 11 PC inexplicably took twenty minutes to start up. There does not appear to be anything actually wrong with it. It has had every scan, virus check, hardware tweak imaginable run, and has had Windows completely reinstalled multiple times. Once Windows starts, it is mostly fine, with the following exception:
When browsing the Internet, occasionally both Firefox and Chrome will just… stop doing anything, to such a degree that they prevent the rest of Windows from doing anything. Checking logs indicates that nothing is particularly happening on the CPU, memory, storage or network front whenever this happens, it just… happens. Firefox does it marginally less than Chrome did, thus I have switched to Firefox.
When using my computer to browse Nextdoor, which is a site that eventually paid off during our search for Oliver, scrolling down more than about a screen and a half will cause the entire website to completely shit the bed, moving its sidebar to the middle of the screen before snapping you back to the top of the feed you were attempting to scroll through.
When using my phone to browse Nextdoor, a post where someone said the bin men had just been and not taken their bin remained at the top of my feed for the entire three weeks that Oliver was missing.
My keyboard just told me it had "low battery" despite being plugged in. I unplugged it and replugged it in and now it claims to have 98% battery.
My keyboard doesn't charge while plugged in if I don't have the Razer software running.
My mouse can have its wireless signal blocked by a packet of crisps.
My PC game controller sometimes requires turning on three times before it's actually turned on.
The Bluetooth on my work PC refuses to turn on despite showing as being present and working.
When listening to YouTube videos while falling asleep, at least 8 times out of 10, the app will randomly close itself for no apparent reason in the middle of a video.
It's frustrating that, when you're someone who takes good care of their tech — as I always have been — stuff just… fucks up after a while for no apparent reason. My woes with Windows on my living room PC are a longstanding issue that I am at my absolute wits' end with; I am getting perilously close to installing Bazzite and being done with Windows, particularly now I no longer need to work on this machine. Oddly enough, I have had zero Windows-related issues with my work mini PC, other than the Bluetooth problem, which may well be hardware-related.
I just miss the time when you bought something that was expensive and fancy, that it worked, and it continued to work for many years after you spent lots of money on it. Still, I knew that age was long past all those years ago when I updated my iPhone 3G to the latest iOS and it became completely unusable. I still went and upgraded to an iPhone 4 like a big mug, though, didn't I? Twat.
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Around the same time Sony is doing its best to completely murder the traditions and culture surrounding video games, and Xbox continues to implode, Nintendo has gone and put out multiple games that feel… almost out of their own time. And I mean that in a very complimentary way; both Star Fox (released on the 25th of last month) and Rhythm Paradise Groove (released yesterday, also known as Rhythm Heaven Groove if you're American) feel like games from at least two hardware generations ago, and that's absolutely a good thing.
The two games are very different experiences, but the one thing they have in common is that they respect your time in the way that titles from, say, the PlayStation 2 era did. You can do a complete playthrough of Star Fox in under an hour, and Rhythm Paradise Groove consists entirely of self-contained sequences that are no more than two or three minutes, tops. You can blast through all the "content" both games have in a relatively short space of time, but their longevity comes from their replay value: Star Fox for the pursuit of "medals" by attaining specific scores on each level while ensuring all your computer-controlled companions survive, and Rhythm Paradise Groove for attaining "Amazing" and "Perfect" ratings on each stage.
I'm growing increasingly fond of games that aren't a huge commitment to play; games that you can just pick up and enjoy whenever you feel like it, without feeling that strange sense of "guilt" many of us have if we already have a "big game" on the go and start something else that is likely to take more than 40 hours to get through. I'm not just talking about bite-sized arcade-style games, either; the other night I started playing Soul Blazer on Super NES, and I know that's relatively short in the grand scheme of RPGs, so I'm looking forward to finally making my way through the whole thing; something I've been meaning to do for ages.
I like a good long game to get my teeth into now and again, you know that — but I won't lie; there are times when I start something that I think is going to be relatively light and breezy, see it has an endless skill tree and various numbers to grind up very slowly in the name of increasing my poison damage by 0.1%, and just think "oh no, this is going to take ages, isn't it?" There are a significant number of games that have been released over the course of the last 10-15 years or so that would have really benefited from just scaling back, like, a lot, and providing a much more focused experience. They usually don't because they have to justify their massive budgets and thousands of people working on them — plus, unfortunately, there is a subculture among capital-G Gamers™ who complain any time something comes out with what they perceive as "not enough content".
It's unfortunate that so many developers have listened to the people who whine in Steam forums about games being "abandoned" because they haven't had an update in the last three weeks (protip: sometimes those games are finished) or that they need to see a "roadmap" of "new content" coming down the pipeline. I always feel the exact opposite to this; if I see a game that has a lengthy roadmap — particularly if that roadmap involves copious amounts of DLC — I lose a lot of interest in that game. Sometimes I will return to it later to see if there's some sort of "complete" edition available, but most of the time I will just shrug my shoulders and go and play a game that is actually finished instead, rather than spending valuable time playing something that I know is probably going to change and expand in the time it takes me to beat it.
I like both Star Fox and Rhythm Paradise Groove because they are both finished games, and seeing everything they have to offer is within relatively easy reach. Both will require some practice and some actual playing skill to see all that stuff, but neither of them feel like they're going to be commitments with hour counts that number into the three digits just to see the credits roll.
I suspect Star Fox might see some updates to its multiplayer mode if it proves popular, but as a single-player experience, it is completely self-contained and does everything it needs to. Rhythm Paradise Groove I suspect will just stand as it is — it didn't even need an update when I put the cartridge in for the first time earlier, which is always a very welcome sight these days.
I hope we see more games like this. Nintendo seems to be quite keen on them right now, and I'm not complaining when they are as good as Star Fox and Rhythm Paradise Groove are — and speaking of which, I'll have more to say about the latter over on MoeGamer when I've played a bit more of it. For now, I'll just say "cha, cha, cha, bom bom" and leave it at that…
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Yesterday, I talked generally about the impact PlayStation had on me and my friendship group thanks to stone-cold classics like Ridge Racer, Tekken and Final Fantasy VII. Today I want to talk about another aspect of that time which I have fond memories of — but which hasn't been a thing for some years now, and which will definitely no longer be a thing once Sony finally pulls the plug on production of physical PlayStation discs. (Incidentally, their announcement of this is now, at the time of writing, up to 135 pages of comments, with over 7,000 universally negative responses, and I suspect these numbers will continue to grow for some time as yet.)
The Cave museum, part of the Retro Collective, has an interactive recreation of what an old software shop would have looked like back in the day.
Anyway. Yes. What I wanted to talk about was the fact that once we got into sixth form, a lot of us started to enjoy our first real tastes of proper independence, despite, in most cases, still living with our parents. Learning to drive allowed us to go places without having to rely on getting our parents to give us a lift — and give them the full details of where we were going. We were trusted to take responsibility for our own education, meaning several of us went to one single General Studies lesson in two years and still managed to ace the exam. Taking part-time jobs of various descriptions allowed us to earn some money, giving us considerably more financial freedom than childish "pocket money" provided. (Although saying that, my grandparents were always very generous in that regard.)
That latter one is an important one, as it coincided with us being able to spend that money on things that we liked. For my friends and I, those things were video games. And it was an enormously exciting time to be interested in video games, with the PlayStation having hit the market a few years earlier, and the Nintendo 64 finally arriving in Europe as we were kicking off our period of post-compulsory education.
I have fond memories of sixth form not just because I enjoyed the academic side of things — that's something I've talked about elsewhere — but also because of what happened between those classes. For my friends and I, we spent the majority of our time hanging out in the Art department of the school rather than the main sixth form common room; the corner of the Art department had essentially been taken over as a semi-private secondary common room that was almost exclusively used by my friends and I. It was a comfortable place to hang out, and we had many pleasant free periods spent there enjoying a bacon and cheese baguette from the recreation centre on the school site, just chatting about all sorts of silly things.
Quite often, if we had several free periods in a row, or free time up to and including lunchtime, we would wander off the school site — as we were allowed to do now, because we were big, brave, responsible 16+ year olds — and walk into the town centre. This was a walk of about a mile in total — my 45 year old bones ache just thinking about that — but we did it on a pretty regular basis. When we got into town, we had a bit of a routine: we'd go to The Baker's Oven for a bacon and cheese puff and a Belgian bun (though not if we had recently consumed one of the aforementioned baguettes), then head to Barneys, the local record shop, and have a little look around. I would always feel mildly uneasy in there because it was still the age where one felt distinctly judged for one's taste in music, but after a while I learned to just own my self-described "eclectic" tastes in music.
Barneys wasn't the main attraction of our trips to town, though. We saved the best for last by heading to First Compute, a pokey little shop in the "Cross Keys" shopping mews that was initially little more than a cupboard with games for pretty much every platform you can think of festooning every wall (and a fair bit of the floor). By the time we were in sixth form, though, the owner, who we only knew as "Richie", had moved venue to a slightly larger establishment, but the distinct feeling that as much stuff as possible was being crammed in remained. There were big box PC games on some shelves on the left, and PlayStation and N64 games on the right.
At the time, I had had the good fortune to score a few freelance writing opportunities for outlets such as PC Zone and the Official Nintendo Magazine. These at least partly came about because I did my Year 10 work experience on PC Zone when my brother was the editor, but my brother's the sort of person who wouldn't have recommended me to his successors if he didn't think I could have done a good job. And I did do a good job — and, more to the point, in those days, you got paid a hell of a lot more for cranking out an article than you do for many of today's websites. We're talking about £300-£500 per piece here.
As you can probably imagine, being in a situation where I had very little in the way of living expenses thanks to still living at home, this cash very quickly burned a sizeable hole in my pocket, and my friends knew this. I would often get a little "gentle encouragement" to pick up a new game for either PlayStation or Nintendo 64, and honestly, as much as peer pressure very much was involved, I didn't need much convincing. I found both systems to be a ton of fun, and I loved being able to share my enjoyment of them with my closest friends.
On the Nintendo 64 front, we quite often picked up games with a multiplayer focus, as we spent a lot of time around one another's houses, crowded around the television enjoying split-screen fun. We even tried some types of game that, in prior years, we would have never considered, like EA's World Cup 98 when the eponymous tournament was on.
On the PlayStation front, my preference was, as you can probably imagine if you know me even a little bit, for role-playing games, and dear Lord do I ever wish I'd held on to the vast majority of those games I bought all those years ago, because little was I to know that role-playing games in particular would become enormously expensive on the second-hand market.
Of all those times I was mildly peer-pressured into buying a new game, I only remember one solitary occasion when I was disappointed and regretful enough in my purchase to actually return the game in question. That game was a title for PlayStation called Blaze & Blade: Eternal Quest, and it was a polygonal action RPG for up to four players. It looked like it might be cool from the box art, and there were some interesting ideas in it, but it was very much not what I was looking for from a game at the time. I'm actually quite curious to revisit this game through older, more mature eyes, as I suspect I may have treated it a bit harshly.
The pattern of go-to-town, buy-a-game continued once I got to university and fell in with friends who also enjoyed gaming. Since I was still getting some cash from freelancing, I still had a bit of disposable income, though living away from home meant I did actually have living expenses now. Still, I managed to pick up a bunch of interesting games, and reading the manuals while on the bus home was always a highlight of these times that I think back on fondly. It's a cliché to talk about reading the manual on the way home, but it really was a thing we did, and it really is something I have exceedingly happy memories of.
New games haven't come with manuals for a long time now, outside of a few special cases in limited-print editions, and situations like Evercade where the whole thing is built on the idea of "how it used to be" — and with the apparently impending death of physical releases, even the experience of going to a game shop, picking up a game and coming home with it will be lost. Of course, many people — including me — tend to order their games online these days anyway, so many of us haven't been doing that anyway — but it's still sad to think that there are generations of video game enthusiasts who will never be able to enjoy things in quite the same way we did around the end of the millennium and the turn of the century.
I'm mad at Sony for actively encouraging the death of that. They are deliberately trying to destroy what was once an important part of the overall culture surrounding video games. I suspect those who have never been deeply into them might not understand why this is a big deal — and I equally suspect the C-suite execs who mandated this are exactly the sort of people who have never actually given a shit about video games as a creative medium or form of expression — but it really was. Sony's announcement left a lot of people feeling like they really had lost something; feeling something akin to grief. It might sound silly to say that about something as simple as going into a shop and buying a box with a bit of plastic inside it, but it really is the case.
I sincerely hope the company does a hasty U-turn on this, but I very much doubt they will. If that's the case, that's the end of me and PlayStation. Once there's no more games to buy and proudly put on my shelf, that's it for me and new games. I've always said this. And in some respects, I don't mind, either — it'll mean I don't have to worry about running out of what little space I have left on my shelves, and that I will be able to focus on diving deep into my collection and discovering all the things I haven't gotten around to yet.
But still. I will be sad to have lived long enough to see a medium and a culture surrounding it grow, thrive and then wither. I am already sad that I have seen that happen, but every new week seems to bring a new horror in that regard.
We will always have the good times, though. That's the one thing they can never revoke the license for.
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As I absorb the news that Sony is giving up on physical releases of games — something I have had a good rant about at much more length over on MoeGamer, so please go read that — I can't help but think back to the time PlayStation hit the scene, and the incredible amount of promise that video games showed back then. This coincides with a period of time I often describe as the happiest of my life, and the video games were a big part of that, for a variety of reasons.
I remember my first encounter with PlayStation vividly. My brother had come home to visit, and, as he often did, he had brought some gaming hardware with him. On previous visits — and prior to me getting my own SNES — he had brought both a Super Famicom and Mega Drive back with him on various occasions, but this new PlayStation thing was one of the most exciting things I had ever seen.
We loaded up Ridge Racer and you could play Galaxian while it was loading. Supposedly you could unlock some stuff if you could win the Galaxian game before the game finished loading, but I didn't manage that right away. (I mastered it some time later.) Then, once Ridge Racer was loaded, it was another example of something we'd previously described the SNES as being: "like having an arcade machine hooked up to your TV".
This feeling didn't go away with Tekken, which my brother had a prerelease copy of. He also had Raiden Project, which, while less obviously "impressive" than both Ridge Racer and Tekken, I found myself enjoying a lot, and still consider one of my favourite PlayStation titles to this day.
Eventually, my brother left behind this Japanese-model PlayStation at my parents' house for me to have — he had got his own British model. I was thrilled, particularly once I learned the "pen-lid trick" — a means of circumventing the console's region and copy protection by propping the disc tray open and carefully timing the swapping of discs. It was a good way to wear out your laser before long, but until I got my own UK PlayStation, it was my main means of experiencing PAL releases.
My friends got PlayStations around a similar time, and we all really enjoyed them, each cultivating our own little collection of games.
Then came Final Fantasy VII. I first heard about this from my brother, and one thing made me want to pick it up immediately: he told me that it was the first game that had made him and various other people he knew cry. This might seem like a strange reason to be excited for a game, but having been enjoying point-and-click adventures on PC for a few years at this point, I was immensely excited by the possibilities that interactive storytelling offered, and I was curious exactly what this game actually was.
I started to play it and was initially confused. Why did the screen go all swirly and then I couldn't move, but I had to select things from a menu instead? Why did the characters look different when they were walking around to when they were in battle? Why were numbers popping out of things?
I'd encountered the RPG genre in a very early form back on the Atari 8-bit, but had always found those games to be difficult to understand as a child. Some years later, I got into HeroQuest and Advanced Heroquest, and started to understand how numbers and turn-based combat worked together. And with Final Fantasy VII, I quickly learned how the computerised take on an RPG worked — and that I liked it a lot.
My friends loved it, too. We all swapped stories of our custom-named parties at school, arguing over who had given their characters the "best" names and who had recoloured the text window the most attractively garish combination of shades. We all agreed it was an incredible experience, and played it multiple times in succession — often in immediate succession. I estimate over the course of one particular summer, each of us must have played through the entirety of that game somewhere between six and ten times.
My parents went away for a few weeks and left me in charge of the house. I hosted an ill-advised party that I got into a lot of trouble for — I have to laugh in retrospect — but the best thing about that summer was having my friends over pretty much every day, and we would just play Final Fantasy VII together while eating Pot Noodles and getting steadily quite drunk. On one particularly memorable occasion, we challenged one another to play from the beginning and stay up as long as possible; we played through the night and into the next morning, hitting each other with sofa cushions to wake each other up if we looked like we were nodding off. It was a truly wonderful experience, and absolutely a treasured memory.
It all feels so far away now. I would love to have a summer like that which I just described again, but it feels like a far-off dream at this point.
Still, I mean I am still in touch with some of those friends, so perhaps, just perhaps, we could make something like that happen once again sometime. Maybe.
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As I often do on my regular trips in to the office (when I'm driving, anyway), I listened to a bunch of the Fun Factor podcast over the last couple of days. If you're unfamiliar, this is an excellent show hosted by sports writer Ty Schalter and video game critic Aidan Moher where the pair (and sometimes guests) discuss old video games magazines, the reviews therein, and the games covered.
Here's a stock image that appears to be scientifically designed to upset anyone who knows anything about video games. Photo by Mahmoud Yahyaoui on Pexels.com
I am quite a few episodes behind, but the nice thing about the show is that its very nature means that it is somewhat timeless, and each episode can be enjoyed at any time. Thus, yesterday and today I enjoyed some discussion of Next Generation magazine's "Are You a Hardcore Gamer?" quiz (circa 1998) and the pair's collaboration with Coury and Try from My Life in Gaming to discuss a "draft" of games from the 1995-1997 period covered by Fun Factor's first season.
Obviously I will take this opportunity to recommend you go give Fun Factor a listen (or even better, watch: the podcast's YouTube channel lets you look at the magazines as they're talking about them!) but today's post isn't specifically about the podcast. Rather, it's about how the discussions on the episodes I listened to, particularly the "draft" episode, have inspired me to make some time to play through a bunch of games I keep telling myself I've "always meant to get around to". By this I am primarily referring to retro games, particularly of the RPG variety, of which I have about a bazillion loaded up and ready to go almost immediately thanks to my MiSTer Multisystem 2 setup upstairs. And I can even play them on a CRT!
I hesitate to start new RPGs because I have it in my head that they're all massively long. And to be sure, your average RPG does tend to be on the longer side. But listening to the chaps enthusing about various titles like Chrono Trigger (which, to my shame, I've never finished), Final Fantasy IV (which I have finished and know is pretty short) and various others makes me think… I should just sit down and play some of these things that I've been "always meaning to". Including some that I've started and never got around to finishing, like Soul Blazer.
Soul Blazer is definitely one I want to tick off my list because it is an excellent game, and I've always felt like it wouldn't be quite right to tackle Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma, both of which I want to play, before beating that one. They are considered an extremely loose "trilogy", after all, and I think it would be particularly interesting to play in succession.
Part of me says "no, don't start something new, you have Final Fantasy XI on the go". But Final Fantasy XI is very long indeed, and sometimes you just want a palate cleanser. Sometimes that's something really quick and breezy, like the new Star Fox, while at other times, it's another game with a bit more substance, but which is unlikely to end up with an hour count that is three or more digits in length.
So probably not tonight, because it's getting late and I still have a farty stomach full of regret from the pizza I had last night, but very soon, I'm going to set some time aside to enjoy some retro gaming. I have all the kit — I might as well make good use of it and enjoy myself, non?
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I am someone who grew up with what I would describe as a healthy sense of respect for the police. I have never run afoul of them — the most "negative" encounter I have had with them was when I was about 18, driving my Mum's car around at about midnight, having been to visit some friends, and I got pulled over to be asked "is this your vehicle, sir?" to which the answer was, of course, "no, but I am insured on it." I wasn't speeding or driving dangerously, so I guess I was just stopped as some sort of random check or something.
However, in more recent years, I have come to somewhat lose faith in the police as a whole. I would go so far as to question what on Earth they are actually doing any more, having been in situations where a police presence would have obviously been quite helpful — mostly antisocial behaviour in the street, and particularly little scrots racing obviously stolen motorbikes around the area — and not seeing anything actually worthwhile happening.
I always used to enjoy watching shitty television like Police Interceptors, particularly when I am away from home, like I am this evening for the monthly trip to the office. But nowadays I just find them frustrating to watch, not because of the interesting things you see the cops in the show doing, but because of the inevitably disappointing follow-ups that inform you that despite all the hard work of the officers on the ground in a particular case, nothing of any actual note really happened to the people who deserved either some sort of consequences or some justice for what had happened.
Take the episode I caught part of this evening. A significant portion of the episode consisted of the police discovering a strange house that had seemingly been sitting empty, but which a local had seen some suspicious-looking individuals apparently breaking into. Upon arrival at the scene, the investigating officers found a machete case and what seemed to be some bloodstains on the floor. Once the armed police unit had been called in for backup, they investigated the house and discovered that it was not so empty at all; it, along with its next-door neighbour, which had had a hole punched through the wall to connect the two, was being used as a cannabis farm, with plants worth over half a million quid on site.
As part of this investigation, the plants were seized, as you might expect, and some fingerprints were found that you would think might lead to some further investigation. However, the programme made the disappointing announcement that after all that, "no further action was taken".
Look, I get sometimes that it's not possible to bring people to justice for their crimes — and that police dramas on the television, where the noble officers always get their man, are not at all reflective of reality. But quite often it feels like after a token "visible" effort has been made — while the cameras are on, in the case of a show like Police Interceptors — then something causes "the police", collectively, to just sort of shrug its shoulders and go "ah, well, probably wouldn't have caught them anyway" or something along these lines.
This must be inordinately frustrating for the officers on the ground who are pursuing these criminals with the hope of bringing them to justice. Can you imagine feeling pretty damn good about yourself for uncovering half a million quid's worth of drugs, and then discovering later that pretty much nothing was done about it? I can imagine that being exceedingly irritating — but unsurprising, given the amount of bureaucracy that goes into anything involving "local authorities" these days, be it teaching, policing or getting potholes fixed.
I also completely understand those who mistrust the very concept of the police on the grounds that the service continues to struggle with institutionalised discrimination, both within its own ranks and towards potential suspects. There has been outright violence and rioting in my city as a result of this sort of thing just recently — I don't really know all the details, but from what I understand, it has left a lot of people looking at our local police force in a somewhat less than complimentary light.
I'm pretty sure the residents in the area I live in are frustrated, too. There's a house just down the road from us that is very obviously one of the sources of the reckless teenagers racing around on obviously stolen motorcycles — because the obviously stolen motorcycles are parked outside the house. And it's obvious that they're stolen, because the lineup parked there seems to change on a pretty much daily basis. No-one buys and sells that many motorcycles in that short a space of time unless they are up to no good. And yet I know the police have been informed of this on multiple occasions by a variety of people, and yet nothing has been done.
So what even are they doing any more? I don't know. What I do know is that these days, I feel much less inclined to trust the police than I did in the past. And while in some ways that makes me feel a bit sad, in others I feel it's a sensible, healthy attitude to take, particularly as the world seems to be sliding inexorably towards global authoritarianism.
It's been said many times before, but we really are living in the absolute worst, most tedious cyberpunk dystopia that ever existed. We're getting pretty much all of the shit that sci-fi authors warned us about, with none of the fun stuff.
Oh well. Perhaps one day this will pass.
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There are a lot of things I don't like about myself, but one of the things that I have always been rather pleased with is my willingness to engage with the English language. A lot of this stems from being encouraged well at an early age, both by my parents and at school, but also a natural sense of inquisitiveness and curiosity about the use of words and language.
I mention this because I am seeing more and more reports of a "literacy crisis" that appears to be arising, primarily as a result of "BookTok" (i.e. people on the odious short-form video platform TikTok who supposedly talk about books) and "book influencers" (i.e. people on a broader range of primarily video-based social platforms who supposedly talk about books). Most recently, the thing that has come up is some of these people complaining to authors when they come across a word they do not understand — and rather than looking that word up for themselves, using it as an opportunity to learn, they instead throw their toys out of the pram and get very mardy, even going so far as to throw around terms like "ableist". (Fuck off. Your assumption that disabled people can't read is the ableist perspective here.)
This sort of behaviour is absolutely unthinkable and unfathomable to me. I have always loved it when I learn new words, concepts or ways to express myself from things that I've read. There are turns of phrase I picked up as a child that I still use to this day, and I relish the opportunity to make use of a word that I've recently learned.
I am also more than happy to look something up if I'm not sure of it. I actually tend to find this happens more often while I am writing than reading; I'll be tapping out a sentence, and for some reason a particular word that I'm not entirely certain of the definition of will pop into my head as maybe-possibly being appropriate for the situation. Rather than shying away from using that word for fear of appearing stupid by using it incorrectly, I will look it up, determine whether or not it is, in fact, appropriate for the situation in question, and then, if possible, make good use of it. It's not out of a desire to appear "clever" or to baffle the reader with my vast vocabulary; I just find it fun and satisfying to discover new ways in which one can play with language.
I've always been like this. I started reading books that were well ahead of where I was "supposed" to be as a kid, so by the time I got to primary school I was reading things several "Levels" ahead of my peers and taking on considerably more challenging reading comprehension exercises. By the top end of primary school, I was busting out words like "antidisestablishmentarianism" and "floccinaucinihilipilification" in the morning Daily Spellings session in Class Four, and being able to correctly use them in a sentence.
I apparently once also terrified my parents by, one day, aged maybe three or four, coming down the stairs and immediately quoting the beginning of Genesis to them. In this particular instance, it was not a "reading" thing — I hadn't been secretly ploughing through the Bible in between episodes of the Mr. Men — but rather a quotation from a cartoon I had recently watched on video. I guess it's connected, though; I had found the whole "In the beginning…" speech striking, so I wanted to deliver it in my own childish way. That's still a way of playing with language, just using the spoken word and listening instead of reading and writing.
The concept of "BookTok" makes me angry. It is completely beyond me exactly how anyone thought a community of people who make short-form attention-deficit videos online were ever going to come out with anything particularly worthwhile to say about a medium that rewards taking your time and drinking things in. And the very term "book influencer" makes me bristle. We never should have accepted the marketers' insistence than "influencer" is a valid job description. It's disgustingly dystopian, particularly since "influencer marketing" is now an established part of promoting any sort of product online.
I love language. I love reading, and I love writing. It makes me by turns sad and furious that, in the space of a generation or two, we appear to be losing all respect for the written word. Just the other day, I saw someone online earnestly recommending that anyone who wanted to spend their time talking about a favourite topic should "just become a TikToker" rather than starting a blog. I bit my tongue at the time because I couldn't be arsed to start a fight, but it just made me feel weary more than anything.
What are we doing? It almost feels like a deliberate attempt to siphon all the "culture" out of society, perhaps in an attempt to ensure that none of us step out of line or express any sorts of "dangerous" opinions.
Funny, I think there are a few books about that…
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The heat wave we've been suffering all week appears to have broken; outside is a relatively normal-feeling temperature right now, the humidity is down to levels where it's actually possible to breathe, and the sky has taken on a typically British summertime partially overcast look. It's really quite pleasant; if it could just stay like this, that would be absolutely lovely.
The view through the patio doors as I type this.
Andie has been spending some time putting up window screens, which will have the dual purpose of "cat-proofing" the windows and allowing us to cool the house down somewhat by actually having the windows open. Obviously we are not keen for any sort of repeat of the last three weeks, so we are hoping that this particular solution — some seemingly well-crafted screens for the windows, attached to the frames via Velcro — will prove adequate. Oliver has not yet attempted to escape through one of the open windows and the house is significantly cooler than it has been for the past few days, so it's looking like we might be on to a winner.
Of course, we're still both extremely worried that he will somehow find his way out again, particularly if he succeeds in figuring out how to remove the window screens — if, indeed, he figures out that is a thing that is possible. Thus far he has shown no interest in wanting to move or scratch them — indeed, both cats have mostly just seemed appreciative that they can enjoy a bit of fresh air coming into the house, particularly now that there is a bit of a breeze coming in from outside, rather than the oppressively still and humid air of the last few days.
It is good to be able to leave the air-conditioned bedroom and enjoy a relatively normal existence in the rest of the house. Today I have mostly been playing the new Star Fox, which you can read more about over on MoeGamer. It's also actually our wedding anniversary today, but we never make a particularly big deal out of that. We are grateful to our respective parents for their generous financial gifts, however; those are going a significant way towards us being able to have another holiday in September as a "do-over" of the one we just had — and hopefully this time without the anxiety of a missing little ginger twat.
Oliver himself appears to have pretty much made a full recovery. He is behaving just like he used to — right down to showing an unhealthy interest in batting my Senran Kagura collection off the shelves in the living room — and is jumping up to his favourite high places, including the top shelf in the catio and the top of our media cabinet. He hasn't yet been back up to the very top of his cat tree, however; he's been most of the way up, but not all of the way up. We think he's dealing with a combination of still being a bit weak in his back legs (something the vet mentioned) and potentially still having a bit of trauma over being stuck up an actual tree, and thus perhaps not wanting to climb too high. His back legs are a lot stronger than they were already, however; he's been jumping up onto things without issue, and playing with things like the silly little deeply, deeply loved kitten he is.
Patti has also mostly adjusted to Oliver's return. She is still hissing at him a bit if he gets too close, but one gets the impression her heart really isn't in it. Earlier today, Oliver went right up to her and rubbed his face on her, and she hissed quietly, but didn't attack him and didn't actually appear to be all that bothered. I think she just feels obliged to appear mad at him, because she absolutely definitely won't admit that she was missing him and pining for him while he was absent.
Anyway, all in all, it has been a pleasant Saturday, and in the knowledge that some of the most difficult, time-consuming and challenging projects at work are now pretty much done, I actually feel like I can properly relax for the first time in quite a while! I recommend it.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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